A research lab at ICTA-UAB
Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have the potential to respond to climate change, enhance biodiversity and improve environmental quality while contributing to economic regeneration and social well-being. Yet there is a substantial gap between the promise of NBS and their uptake. To unlock the potential of NBS for sustainable urban development, Naturvation will take a transdisciplinary, internationally comparative approach to 1) advance assessment approaches to capturing the multiple impacts and values of NBS to deliver a robust evidence base for decision-making, 2) enable innovation to identify the most promising governance, business/finance and participation models and how to overcome the systemic conditions that currently limit their use to support systemic integration, and 3) generate momentum to realise the potential of NBS through co-design, co-development & co-implementation of new partnerships, knowledge, recommendations, processes and tools required to build capacity, enable replication and foster cultural change.
Research Team: Filka Sekulova, Francesc Baró, Isabelle Anguelovski, James Connolly, Panagiota Kotsila, Ella Kim (MIT)
NBS and Naturvation on Sostenible.cat
An article summarizing how nature-based solutions are defined, how they have emerged and how they are being deployed in cities like Barcelona.
Urban Nature Atlas
This online tool identifies 1,000 examples of Nature-Based Solutions in 100 European cities. Many of these NBS are now studied by the Naturvation team to better understand their governance, including their trajectory, financing, innovation, and social ramifications—including questions of environmental justice and green gentrification.
Dialogues for Nature-based Solutions and Green Infrastructure in Barcelona
Through a series of meetings organized as a stakeholder engagement process under the framework of the European research projects Naturvation (NATure-based Urban innoVATION) and Enable (Enabling Green And Blue Infrastructure Potential In Complex Social-Ecological Regions), we periodically discuss the potential of urban green infrastructure and nature-based solutions to address a variety of challenges currently faced by the city and metropolitan area of Barcelona.
